FINANCIAL INDICATORS OF TECHNOLOGICAL LEADERS IN THE COAL INDUSTRY IN CONDITIONS OF ECONOMIC INSTABILITY

The Russian coal industry faced serious external restrictions, falling world prices, and rising logistics costs, which have led to a decline in export volumes and consolidated revenues of the companies.The need to improve the financial stability and efficiency of the coal industry makes it an urgent task to find an effective development strategy for its leading companies, i.e. the technological leaders.The purpose of this work is to identify the best available development strategy based on a comparative analysis of the financial results of technological leaders for 2019-2023 with regard to a conservative and an aggressive strategies in conditions of economic instability.The selection included 106 enterprises of the Russian coal industry.The DEA method and methodologies developed by the authors are used to assess the technical efficiency of the companies, to identify the technological leaders, and to evaluate the dynamics of their performance indicators.The technological leaders significantly increased their net sales and net profit under a conservative strategy, and their results are significantly better than those of the faltering enterprises.Under an aggressive strategy, the technological leaders significantly increased their net sales, but the growth in the leaders' revenues was positive, but low.A significant contribution to net sales and profit growth was made by new large-size and small-size leaders, half of which are located in the eastern regions of the Russian Federation.A conservative leadership strategy outperforms an aggressive strategy in terms of both net sales growth and the profit growth.A conservative leadership strategy focused on minimizing costs proved to be more efficient for coal industry enterprises in conditions of economic instability.